Utopia is the hip-hop blockbuster of 2023; a torrent of outrageous production that, in both sound and intent, mobilises superlatives. Travis Scott makes his comeback six years after Astroworld, the crowning achievement of a rise that seemed it would stop at nothing, before colliding with some serious problems with the law and his conscience. He sunk to a very low point, some felt nearing the end of his career. But here he is now, patching up his statute as the heavyweight of the 2010s with this fourth album, aided and abetted by such pundits of the genre as Mike Dean, WondaGurl, Jahaan Sweet and Kanye West (whose influence is obvious). It was a gamble, but one that paid off. Blended with rock and industrial influences, Utopia is first and foremost about big sound, the kind that hits you square in the chest. From Hyaena to the superb Modern Jam (produced by Guy-Man from Daft), from Lost Forever to the whopping single K-Pop, Travis Scott superbly restores his reputation, aided by an army of prestigious featuring artists (Beyoncé, The Weekend, James Blake, Drake, Yung Lean, Playboi Carti...) and his unbridled vocal imagination. © Brice Miclet/Qobuz

This umpteenth studio album from the legendary Genesis guitarist and multi-instrumentalist follows his 2021 double-header of Under a Mediterranean Sky and Surrender of Silence. A vaguely autobiographical rite-of-passage concept piece about a young character named Travla, it features a familiar cast of longtime Hackett collaborators and promises "ballads, blues, progressive rock, theatre, and fantasia."© TiVo

Five Finger Death Punch (FFDP or 5FDP for the hardcore fans) is the archetypal band everyone loves to hate. Nonetheless, their fanbase continues to grow album after album. Their frontman, guitarist Zoltan Bathory, is a fervent advocate of the pro-gun movement and has supported Donald Trump on numerous occasions - something that’s made the five musicians a point of contention across America. The band took a stand against wearing masks in the middle of the pandemic with their video for the single Living the Dream in 2020. The band’s redneck attitude is as much about metalcore as it is about stadium choruses, all wrapped up in a layer of bling made in Las Vegas, their hometown. With such a pedigree, it’s not surprising that each new release divides opinion.Nothing stops FFDP; not even death. Quite the contrary in fact. Having closely brushed against the reaper’s robe, two band members—Zoltan Bathory and singer Ivan Moody—decided to focus on this subject, transforming their last studio production into a concept album, something unheard of until that point. This record uses the same basic recipe: the opening single, ‘Welcome To The Circus’, alternates big metal riffs and catchy choruses, whilst the tracks ‘Afterlife’ and ‘Pick Up Behind You’ feature melodic vocals that instantly evoke a time when neo-metal reigned supreme on the American airwaves. The polished compositions and production also bring the band’s new soloist, Andy James, into the spotlight. He replaced Jason Hook who quit the band after 11 years.If you trek to the centre of this saturated jungle that’s alive with FM vocals, you’ll find the band rubbing shoulders with trap rhythms on ‘Judgment Day’, which leans towards current urban music but without the auto-tune. Five Finger Death Punch will hardly surprise its audience despite the discreet musical experimentation that they’ve dotted here and there. However, this album confirms that they’re still a huge machine that was born to perform live and get crowds moving. Though it might seem to lack spontaneity, their music is perfectly conceived and is guaranteed to get fists pumping and heads banging. © Chief Brody/Qobuz

Until 2003's 100th Window, each Massive Attack album had been a discrete record, stylistically distinct and mostly unconnected to what had gone before it (even if it included the same vocalists). By sounding like an inferior copy of the 1998 landmark Mezzanine, 100th Window broke a string and led to negative reviews. Heligoland marks a return to departures. The sound of Massive Attack circa 2010 has some similarities to what the group has done in the past, but overall, this represents a radical shift in music-making. Granted, most of the Massive Attack hallmarks are still here: gripping music laden with tension and dread, a production that sounds fathoms deep, and an insular worldview represented by a cast of vocalists both new and old. (The new voices include Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, Elbow's Guy Garvey, and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe.) What's immediately apparent, however, from the opener "Pray for Rain" is the sparseness and understated air on display here. With Adebimpe on vocals, the track begins with a rattling of bones and a resigned air whose closest predecessor is "In a Lonely Place" by New Order (a group who practically defined the word understated with their music prior to 1982). This certainly isn't the Massive Attack that floated the smoothest British house of the early '90s, and more surprisingly, it's also not the Massive Attack that created dense, immersive trip-hop during the '90s and early 2000s. At times, it's clear that Robert Del Naja and Neil Davidge's work on soundtracks during the 2000s has adversely affected their main project, resulting in music that skirts the background as often as not. Heligoland often sounds like a soundtrack, most likely the score to some dystopic thriller such as Children of Men or 28 Days Later. The album also isn't as experimental as the music Massive Attack made in the past. Unlike Portishead's Third, a classic comeback from their fellow Bristolians, it also lacks the balance of experimentation and emotion (the latter especially has often been a weakness in Massive Attack's output compared to their peers). True, Horace Andy and Hope Sandoval front some impressive productions, and Damon Albarn's "Saturday Come Slow" is one of his best post-Blur features (including Gorillaz), but overall Heligoland lacks the majesty and might of classic Massive Attack.© John Bush /TiVo

To say that Vincent Peirani has done a lot to change perceptions of the accordion would be an understatement. He joins many others before him who have proved the “piano with straps” can make sweet music; unaffected by the clichés often associated with the instrument. From the very beginning, Peirani has planted himself firmly in the ground of jazz, and as his sound has grown, it’s quickly branched off in different directions. Jokers serves to give his one-of-a-kind sound an extra dimension. The album was recorded at the end of 2021 with guitarist Federico Casagrande and drummer Ziv Ravitz, both of whom are elite musicians. From the start, the trio packs a punch with a cover of This Is the New Shit by Marilyn Manson. The album also contains a cover of another big name in metal: Copy of A by Nine Inch Nails. As if this crazy tsunami of sound wasn’t enough, Vincent Peirani sometimes swaps his accordion for a clarinet (the first instrument he ever learnt), a music box, keyboards or even a glockenspiel!But the real attraction of Jokers doesn’t lie in its unusual assortment of instruments, which is anything but gadgetry. Peirani, Casagrande and Ravitz play as one, inventing a language that is often otherworldly. At the heart of this language is a narrative that remains the driving force of the album. Whether the music is tormented or nostalgic, every note is perfectly placed and chosen, keeping the melodic framework in focus. As for Peirani, his accordion has its own unique voice, speaking its mind freely and daring to play with stylistic boundaries. His albums tells a thousand stories: childhood memories; fairytale worlds; sci-fi universes; circus performances and the end of the world. The kaleidoscope of sound created by Peirani and his two friends is mesmerising. With its compositions and unique array of sounds, Jokers is sure to move you. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound -- keyboards -- he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics. It's a throwaway, and the album would have been better had it been left off entirely. But it's also a canard, a sleight-of-hand strategy he's employed before. The jewels shine from the mud immediately after. The mutated swamp tango of "Hoist That Rag" has stuttered clangs and quakes for drums, decorated by distorted Latin power chords and riffs from Ribot, along with thundering deep bass from Claypool. On the ten-plus minute "Sins of My Father," Cody's spooky banjo walks with Taylor's low-strung bass and Waits' shimmering reverbed guitar as he ominously croons, revealing a rigged game of "star-spangled glitter" where "justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig." It's part revelation, part East of Eden, and part backroom political culture framed by the eve of the apocalypse. It's hunted, hypnotic, and spooky. In stripping away convention, Waits occasionally lets his songs go to extremes with absurd simplicity, such as on "Don't Go into That Barn," a musical cousin to his spoken "What's He Building?" from Mule Variations. But there's also the downright riotous squall of "Shake It," which sounds like an insane carny barker jamming with R.L. Burnside, or the riotous raging blues of "Baby Gonna Leave Me." There are "straight" narratives such as "How's It Gonna End," with its slow and brooding beat storyline, and the moving murder ballad "Dead and Lovely," with its drooping, shambolic elegance. There's the spoken word "Circus," with its wispy spindly frame that features Waits on chamberlain. And "Metropolitan Glide" feels like a hell-bent duet between James Brown and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, followed by the fractured, busted-love, ranting-at-God pain that rips through "Make It Rain." The tender "Green Grass" is among Waits' finest broken love songs; it's movingly rendered by a character who could have resided in one of William Kennedy's novels. The set closes with "Day After Tomorrow," featured on MoveOn.org's Future Soundtrack for America. It is one of the most insightful and understated antiwar songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation. Real Gone is another provocative moment for Waits, one that has problems, but then, all his records do. His excesses, however, do nothing to cloud the stellar achievements of his risk-taking vision and often brilliant execution.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Bruce Springsteen expanded the folk-rock approach of his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., to strains of jazz, among other styles, on its ambitious follow-up, released only eight months later. His chief musical lieutenant was keyboard player David Sancious, who lived on the E Street that gave the album and Springsteen's backup group its name. With his help, Springsteen created a street-life mosaic of suburban society that owed much in its outlook to Van Morrison's romanticization of Belfast in Astral Weeks. Though Springsteen expressed endless affection and much nostalgia, his message was clear: this was a goodbye-to-all-that from a man who was moving on. The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle represented an astonishing advance even from the remarkable promise of Greetings; the unbanded three-song second side in particular was a flawless piece of music. Musically and lyrically, Springsteen had brought an unruly muse under control and used it to make a mature statement that synthesized popular musical styles into complicated, well-executed arrangements and absorbing suites; it evoked a world precisely even as that world seemed to disappear. Following the personnel changes in the E Street Band in 1974, there is a conventional wisdom that this album is marred by production lapses and performance problems, specifically the drumming of Vini Lopez. None of that is true. Lopez's busy Keith Moon style is appropriate to the arrangements in a way his replacement, Max Weinberg, never could have been. The production is fine. And the album's songs contain the best realization of Springsteen's poetic vision, which soon enough would be tarnished by disillusionment. He would later make different albums, but he never made a better one. The truth is, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock & roll.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

Monster is indeed R.E.M.'s long-promised "rock" album; it just doesn't rock in the way one might expect. Instead of R.E.M.'s trademark anthemic bashers, Monster offers a set of murky sludge, powered by the heavily distorted and delayed guitar of Peter Buck. Michael Stipe's vocals have been pushed to the back of the mix, along with Bill Berry's drums, which accentuates the muscular pulse of Buck's chords. From the androgynous sleaze of "Crush With Eyeliner" to the subtle, Eastern-tinged menace of "You," most of the album sounds dense, dirty, and grimy, which makes the punchy guitars of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and the warped soul of "Tongue" all the more distinctive. Monster doesn't have the conceptual unity or consistently brilliant songwriting of Automatic for the People, but it does offer a wide range of sonic textures that have never been heard on an R.E.M. album before. © Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The '70s model of Yes runs out of gas. Recorded in a morale slump and an impending haze of drink, Tormato's decent tunes are sabotaged by Rick Wakeman's increasing penchant for cheesy textures and the band's thin overall sound. "Don't Kill the Whale" was their last successful single for years; the soaring "Onward" almost but not quite redeems the twee silliness of "Arriving UFO" and "Circus of Heaven." Of special interest is the pounding "On the Silent Wings of Freedom," which pushes Chris Squire and Alan White to the front of the mix, establishing the kind of aggressive and straightforward rhythms that would propel the band through the '80s. Bass freaks, take note: this tune also marks one of the few appearances of the Dipthong pedal, accounting for Squire's distinctive "bow bow bow" sound.© Paul Collins /TiVo

French hip-hop producer and cinephile Wax Tailor conceptualised his sixth album with a phrase by Orson Welles. The Citizen Kane director regularly stated that his role was to ‘preside over’ the accidents that occurred during the making of a film. For Wax Tailor, it’s also a question of ‘knowing how to capture them in order to make the accident an artistic intention. I decided not to follow a well-established concept but this more instinctive guideline and to go fishing for accidents’. The result is this series of happy accidents, punctuated by samples that always cut to the chase. While rap has undergone major evolutions both stylistically and in terms of its audience, Wax Tailor hasn’t budged an inch, sticking to the abstract hip-hop style originally conceived by DJ Shadow, DJ Krush and DJ Cam. He continues to create cinematic art, making music videos with a retro charm for both his solo tracks and those made with collaborators from diverse stylistic backgrounds. The album is bursting with great songs, such as the beautiful ‘Shaman in Your Arms’, featuring Jennifer Charles (from Elysian Fields), ‘Freaky Circus’ and its golden age boom bap (featuring Mr Lif and Napoleon da Legend), and the incredible ‘Come With Me’, which features his inspiring new muse, Victoria Bigelow © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

A brilliant distillation of '90s alt-rock. A crass and noisy attempt to cash in on grunge. A band in need of rock tunes for an upcoming tour after six years off the road. The fact that R.E.M.'s ninth album Monster can after still inspire such polarities is proof enough that it's worth a fresh listen. New mixes by Scott Litt, a trove of demos and a 1995 live show from Chicago featuring mostly a post-I.R.S. years setlist fills out the portrait of the 25th Anniversary reissue of one of R.E.M.'s most contentious albums. With liner notes in which Peter Buck admits, "We wanted to get away from who we were," Monster 25 is the sound not only of Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Bill Berry pondering what it means to suddenly be rock stars, but also of a band deep in one of those periodic left turns that artists need to pass through or call it quits. And while the lyrics are typical Stipe-ian jabberwocky mangled further by vocals buried in the original mix, it's Peter Buck's ever-present guitar, bashing out crunchy power chords bathed in delay, reverb and buzzsaw distortion, that remains the album's most controversial aspect as he ditches his former loyalty to acoustic textures and intricate arrangements for an overdriven, rocked up Cobain-life heft and snarl that's fiercely front and center in the mix. The remixed album is a very different experience from the original: the instrumental parts are now clearly delineated, instead of a blurry, roaring mix. "Tongue" drops the four beat count off in favor of a simple piano and loud tambourine. The organ, which was prominent in the original, has been lowered in the remix. "Circus Envy's" sizzling guitar distortion has been dialed back and Berry's drums have been pulled forward. Most noticeable of all are Stipe's vocals, some of which are entirely different takes from the original album's. "Crush with Eyeliner" begins with Stipe voicing an unaccompanied "la, la, la" and continues with a more stylized T. Rex and Iggy Pop-influenced vocal take than the original. Some of the changes are outright deletions. Buck's organ in "Let Me In," and his choppy guitar part in "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", and the percussion in "You" are completely gone. These changes are needed context, connecting the album to the band's musical progression and in the process making it seem less like an outlier. © Robert Baird / Qobuz

Its massive success -- it is one of the rare albums to be certified as diamond in the U.S. and it went platinum all over the world; it also won the Album of the Year Grammy for 1992 -- makes it difficult to place Eric Clapton's 1992 MTV Unplugged in context, but it's important to do so. It arrived three years into MTV Unplugged's run -- 1989 also being the year Clapton stirred artistically with the assured AOR of Journeyman -- and a year after Paul McCartney established the practice of an official album release of an Unplugged session with his own Unplugged (The Official Bootleg). Also in 1991, Clapton's young son Conor died in a tragic accident. The guitarist wrote "Tears in Heaven" as a tribute to his late son and, via its inclusion on the 1991 soundtrack to Rush, it became a hit single and, later, a centerpiece to the Unplugged set. The passage of time has blurred the lines separating all these events, suggesting Clapton's 1992 Unplugged was the first-ever MTV album, that it alone was responsible for revitalizing EC's career, that it is was the place where "Tears in Heaven" premiered, when none of that is quite true. What is true is that Unplugged is the concert and album that established the MTV program as a classy, tony showcase for artists eager to redefine themselves via reexamination of their catalogs, which is what Clapton cannily did here. The album's hit was a slow crawl through Derek & the Dominos' "Layla," turning that anguished howl of pain into a cozy shuffle and the whole album proceeds at a similar amiable gait, taking its time and enjoying detours into old blues standards. Clapton is embracing his middle age and the pleasure of Unplugged is to hear him opt out of the pop star game as he plays songs he's always loved. Tellingly, it's these blues and folk covers -- Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues," Big Bill Broonzy's "Hey Hey," the standard "Alberta," Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'," two songs from Robert Johnson ("Walkin' Blues," "Malted Milk") -- that are the best performances here; they're alternately lively and relaxed, Clapton happily conforming to the contours of the compositions. These capture a moment in time, when EC was settling into his age by reconnecting with the past, whereas the originals -- whether it's the revised versions of "Layla" and "Old Love," "Tears in Heaven," or the debut of "My Father's Eyes," originally heard here (and on the 2013 expanded anniversary edition) but released as a single much later in the decade -- point forward to the sharply tailored adult contemporary crooner of the '90s, one who turned out to be very comfortable existing in a world of high thread counts and designer duds. These are the tunes that belong to the '90s -- and several of these also appear on the 2013 expansion, which contains songs that didn't appear on the album, almost all of which are originals apart from an alternate "Walkin' Blues" and "Worried Life Blues" -- but the rest of MTV Unplugged manages to transcend its time because it does cut to the quick of Clapton's musical DNA.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

One strange thing about Eric Clapton's '90s success is that it relied almost entirely on covers and new versions of classic hits; he released no albums of new material between 1989's Journeyman and 1998's Pilgrim. In the decade between the two albums, he had two new hits -- his moving elegy to his deceased son, "Tears in Heaven," and the slick contemporary soul of the Babyface-written "Change the World" -- and Pilgrim tries to reach a middle ground between these two extremes, balancing tortured lyrics with smooth sonic surfaces. Working with producer Simon Climie, his collaborator on the TDF side project, Clapton has created a numbingly calm record that, for all of its lyrical torment, displays no emotion whatsoever. Much of the problem lies in the production, which relies entirely on stiff mechanical drumbeats, gauzy synthesizers, and meandering instrumental interludes. These ingredients could result in a good record, as "Change the World" demonstrated, but not here, due to Pilgrim's monotonous production. Unfortunately, Clapton doesn't want to shake things up -- his singing is startlingly mannered, even on emotionally turbulent numbers like "My Father's Eyes" or "Circus." Even worse, he's content to take a back seat instrumentally, playing slight solos and fills as colorless as the electronic backdrops. The deadened sonics would make Pilgrim a chore even if there were strong songs on the record, but only a handful of tunes break through the murk. Considering that Journeyman, his last album of original material, was a fine workmanlike effort and that From the Cradle and Unplugged crackled with vitality, the blandness of Pilgrim is all the more disappointing.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Jean-Marc Luisada is a passionate man. Cinema captivates him as much as music and his latest recording allows him to bring together the two worlds that are close to his heart. By taking the name of a famous French television programme by Armand Panigel as the title of his new album (Au Cinéma ce soir), the pianist invites us to share in his love of cinema, inflected with a good dose of nostalgia from the memory of his parents’ love. It would appear that the record is entirely dedicated to their memory.The fourteen films, chosen here by Jean-Marc Luisada for the publisher-bibliophile La Dolce Volta, span a period from 1958 (Les Amants by Louis Malle) to 1979 (Manhattan by Woody Allen). So many films, and so much music remaining true to the images. But what a choice for such a refined and informed film buff! Fellini’s La Dolce Vita rubs shoulders with Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema, in which the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony (transcribed for the piano by Alexandre Tharaud) is the recurring theme of Gustav von Aschenbach's impossible quest in the alleys of Venice (which serve to illustrate August von Platen’s poetic verses): "Anyone who has ever contemplated Beauty with his eyes is already doomed to death".Amongst all these films, there is one that has a particular flavour; the disturbing Rendez-vous à Bray that André Delvaux shot in 1971, based on a short story by Julien Gracq. The music of the last piano opuses by Brahms turns the soul inside out like a glove, asking essential questions about absence, silence, and the confusion of feelings. The films evoked in this beautiful album seem to have rubbed off on Jean-Marc Luisada’s interpretations of Nino Rota, Mahler, Mozart (the moving Fantasy in D minor), Brahms, Wagner, and Chopin (who closes the programme with Cris and Chuchotements, the Ingmar Bergman film which ruthlessly examines the difficulty of human relationships). Of course, let’s not forget the dazzling smiles of Scott Joplin and George Gershwin, for whom Luisada gives an exuberant rendition of Rhapsody in Blue. © François Hudry/Qobuz

A brilliant distillation of '90s alt-rock. A crass and noisy attempt to cash in on grunge. A band in need of rock tunes for an upcoming tour after six years off the road. The fact that R.E.M.'s ninth album Monster can after still inspire such polarities is proof enough that it's worth a fresh listen. New mixes by Scott Litt, a trove of demos and a 1995 live show from Chicago featuring mostly a post-I.R.S. years setlist fills out the portrait of the 25th Anniversary reissue of one of R.E.M.'s most contentious albums. With liner notes in which Peter Buck admits, "We wanted to get away from who we were," Monster 25 is the sound not only of Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Bill Berry pondering what it means to suddenly be rock stars, but also of a band deep in one of those periodic left turns that artists need to pass through or call it quits. And while the lyrics are typical Stipe-ian jabberwocky mangled further by vocals buried in the original mix, it's Peter Buck's ever-present guitar, bashing out crunchy power chords bathed in delay, reverb and buzzsaw distortion, that remains the album's most controversial aspect as he ditches his former loyalty to acoustic textures and intricate arrangements for an overdriven, rocked up Cobain-life heft and snarl that's fiercely front and center in the mix. The remixed album is a very different experience from the original: the instrumental parts are now clearly delineated, instead of a blurry, roaring mix. "Tongue" drops the four beat count off in favor of a simple piano and loud tambourine. The organ, which was prominent in the original, has been lowered in the remix. "Circus Envy's" sizzling guitar distortion has been dialed back and Berry's drums have been pulled forward. Most noticeable of all are Stipe's vocals, some of which are entirely different takes from the original album's. "Crush with Eyeliner" begins with Stipe voicing an unaccompanied "la, la, la" and continues with a more stylized T. Rex and Iggy Pop-influenced vocal take than the original. Some of the changes are outright deletions. Buck's organ in "Let Me In," and his choppy guitar part in "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", and the percussion in "You" are completely gone. These changes are needed context, connecting the album to the band's musical progression and in the process making it seem less like an outlier. © Robert Baird / Qobuz